UT Austin Researchers Design First Battery-Powered Cloaking Device

AUSTIN, Texas — Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have proposed the first design of a cloaking device that uses an external source of energy to significantly broaden its bandwidth of operation. Andrea Alù, associate professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering , and his team have proposed a design for an active cloak that draws energy from a battery, allowing objects to become undetectable to radio sensors over a greater range of frequencies. The team's paper, "Broadening the Cloaking Bandwidth with Non-Foster Metasurfaces," was published Dec. 3 in Physical Review Letters . Alù, researcher Pai-Yen Chen and postdoctoral research fellow Christos Argyropoulos co-authored the paper. Both Chen and Argyropoulos were at UT Austin at the time this research was conducted. The proposed active cloak will have a number of applications beyond camouflaging, such as improving cellular and radio , and biomedical sensing.